Achieving an Olympic medal is almost certainly every athlete’s lifelong ambition, the pinnacle of their hard work, perseverance, and commitment. One Olympic medalist, on the other hand, is capturing hearts online by auctioning her medal for a great cause.
A Polish Olympic silver medallist placed her medal up for auction to raise funds for an 8-month-old baby’s heart surgery, but the winning bidder let her retain it.
According to her Facebook profile, javelin thrower Maria Andrejczyk won one of the country’s 14 medals in Tokyo and was motivated to help a stranger in some manner.
Maria Andrejczyk, 25, came to know about a fundraising campaign for Mioszek Maysa, a young child with a serious cardiac ailment who would require surgery to survive. She chose to sell the medal at auction and send the proceeds to Mioszek’s family. The winning bid was $125,000, and the winning bidder, Polish convenience store company Zabka Polska, not only joined the cause, but was so moved by the Olympian’s noble act that they chose to return it to her.
The baby, a Polish native, was turned down for surgery in several European nations due to the procedure’s complexity, and the family’s last chance is Stanford University Medical Center. As of Tuesday night, Mioszek’s fundraising on a Polish GoFundMe-style website is far more than 90% funded.
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Andrejczyk finished fourth in the javelin competition. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, yet she overcame it to win silver in Tokyo.
Folks on social media were moved not just by her generosity, but also by the store’s decision to let the Olympian to keep her medal.